What, I wonder, were the Books of the Year in 1908? Who spotted that The Wind in the Willows had a future? Who, entranced by A Room with a View, picked young EM Forster as a writer to watch? It's a desperately unscientific business, this annual festival of drum-beating, talent-spotting and - let's be honest - self-promotion. But here, from an unscientific scanning of this season's newspaper and magazine round-ups, are the overall winners for 2008.

In fiction, the champion was Joseph O'Neill's remarkably fine novel Netherland, a book too good for the Booker, which scored at least 10 nominations. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga ranked much lower. Confirming the opinion of those who believe that Sebastian Barry was pipped at the post, The Secret Scripture outscored The White Tiger by five to one. Other strong contenders included The Believers by Zoë Heller, and His Illegal Self by Peter Carey. I was surprised to find almost no mention of Marilynne Robinson's new novel Home, every bit the equal of its astonishing companion volume, Gilead.

Among other notable Books of the Year, one winner was Mick Imlah, who got several mentions for his Forward Prize-winning collection of poems, The Lost Leader. Patrick French's The World Is What It Is, an outstanding life of VS Naipaul, was the discerning choice at the high end of literary biography.

Kate Summerscale scored widely for her entertaining The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, and Ferdinand Mount did well with his scintillating, opaque memoir Cold Cream. The late Simon Gray would have been the first to pass a sardonic comment on those who selected his final diary volume, Coda. These, then, were the most prominent picks from several hundred column inches devoted by the literary press to the books of 2008.

To check out the interface between the literary world and the book trade, I took these top picks to some selected London bookshops for informal market research. At Waterstone's, Piccadilly, a literary hyperstore, it was a case of What Recession? On a Tuesday lunchtime the place was heaving, and the front window crowded with new titles, some of which had featured in the round-ups: John le Carré, Philip Roth, Zoë Heller, Dawn French, Julie Walters and Malcolm Gladwell.

Inside, though, is a world - the world of Dawn and Jamie, Nigella and Delia - that bears almost no relationship to the world inhabited by Britain's writers. Among the glossy stacks of Nigella's Christmas and 'Xmas Gifts for Kids' I asked for The White Tiger. 'Let me look that up on the computer,' replied the assistant, with a helpful smile that said she had no idea what I was talking about. While she was consulting her screen I spotted the Booker winner low down some shelves at No 18, sandwiched between Delia Smith's Frugal Food and Gordon Ramsay's Cooking for Friends.

There was no poetry here, interestingly. So it was off to the second floor to find Imlah's The Lost Leader. 'It sold out last week,' the poetry assistant reported, turning to her screen. 'I don't think we've had any more in yet.' Here was one Book of the Year I could not buy in London's biggest bookstore. 'You can check with Hatchards,' she suggested.

Down one floor to New Fiction, past a giant display of The Dangerous Book for Boys. Did they by any chance have The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry? 'Is that sci-fi or fantasy?' asked the sleepy-eyed blonde behind the desk.

'It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.' Oh. 'Well, it might be over there.' We looked, in vain. The girl showed a colleague the cover of The Secret Scripture on her screen. At last, recognition! 'Oh yes. It's here.' She handed it over. 'Too many books,' she said with a sigh. 'Just too many books.' Sadly, it was much simpler in 1908.

Dickens and Austen rub shoulders with Mario

Shakespeare would have been delighted that the video game company Nintendo is going to market a 100 Classic Book Collection, including Hamlet, for its DS machines. He might even have overlooked Nintendo's spelling of 'Jane Austin'. Too bad his representatives can't negotiate a decent royalty. One definition of a classic is that it's out of copyright. Since 2004, Google has enjoyed a nearly-free run, digitising the contents from five of the world's great libraries. Not any more. Harvard librarian and acclaimed historian Robert

Darnton has just blown the whistle, ruling that Google will not be able to sell any copyright material from Harvard's shelves.

That Google-Nintendo merger will have to wait.

Boom and bust in the Roaring Twenties

'Nowadays, when almost everyone is a genius,' wrote F Scott Fitzgerald in a critique of his friend Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, 'the temptation for the bogus to profit is no greater than the temptation for the good man to relax. This should frighten all of us into a lust for anything honest that people have to say about our work.' This is just one of many snappy quotations adorning Lucy Moore's 'biography' of the Roaring Twenties, Anything Goes (Atlantic £19.99), a hoard of timely stories. I particularly liked Groucho Marx's response to the Great Crash: 'All I lost was two hundred and forty thousand ... I would have lost more, but that was all the money I had.'